Poetry · 1901
A Reading of Life, with Other Poems
Meredith's last collection. The title sequence — "The Vital Choice", "With the Huntress", "With the Persuader", "The Test of Manhood" — sets out in verse the argument his novels make in prose: that human beings are answerable to Earth, that blood, brain and spirit must be kept in balance, and that the Comic Spirit attends any failure to do it. "The Cageing of Ares", "The Night-Walk", "Forest History", "A Garden Idyl" and "Foresight and Patience" follow, with shorter lyrics — "Song in the Songless", "The Main Regret", "Alternation" — and a set of hexameter translations of passages from the Iliad, including the invective of Achilles.
George Meredith published A Reading of Life in 1901, at seventy-three. His verse was always harder going than his fiction and he preferred it, and this is the fullest statement of the philosophy underlying both.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the poems complete.
Contents
- The Vital Choice
- I
- II
- With the Huntress
- With the Persuader
- The Test of Manhood
- The Cageing of Ares
- The Night-Walk
- The Hueless Love
- Song in the Songless
- Union in Disseverance
- The Burden of Strength
- Written for the Charing Cross Album
- I
- II
- Alternation
- Hawarden
- At the Close
- Forest History
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- XI
- XII
- XIII
- XIV
- XV
- XVI
- XVII
- XVIII
- XIX
- XX
- XXI
- XXII
- XXIII
- XXIV
- XXV
- XXVI
- XXVII
- XXVIII
- XXIX
- A Garden Idyl
- Foresight and Patience
- The Invective of Achilles
- V. 225
- Marshalling of the Achaians
- Agamemnon in the Fight
- Paris and Diomedes
- Hypnos on Ida
- Clash in Arms of the Achaians and Trojans
- The Horses of Achilles
- The Mares of the Camargue
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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